Society nominated a few new
members who were known to be National Socialists or party sympathizers and chose one of their current members, who was acceptable to
the new government, Hans Freyer, as its co-chairman. However none of the attempts at accommodation saved the society from ruin. Freyer included members
of similar organizations which were more friendly to National Socialism. This
influx of new members, along with the forced emigration of many former ones and the
"inner emigration" of still others, delivered the society completely into the
hands of the dictatorship16. As originally conceived, the society only returned to life
following World War II.
Upon Eric Voegelin's return to Europe in the late 1950's to take up a position
at the University of Munich, Helmut Plegner contacted him to inform him that he had
been elected to the German Sociological Society and to ask if he would accept his
election .17 Voegelin
responded by saying that he considered it an honor and that he accepted with gratitude.18 Even after his return to the United States in
1969 Eric Voegelin remained a member. In 1975 the president, Rainer Lepsius, wrote to
Voegelin, acknowledging that one could no longer expect Eric Voegelin's active participation at the society's meetings and offering him the status of
corresponding member. Lepsius added that it was very important, both to the society and to him
personally, that Voegelin remain a member.19

3. Leopold von Wiese:
"Current Sociology: Germany" (1927)

What were the various views on sociology in the post World War One
atmosphere in which Eric Voegelin became a member of the German Sociological
Society? In 1926, the editor of the "Kolner Vierteljahrshefte
fur Soziolgie", Leopold von Wiese wrote that German Sociology was only
slowly beginning to find acceptance as an academic discipline .20 If, so von
Wiese, one understands sociology as a general social science and reckons various
connate social sciences as parts of it, one can find a scientific tradition and
a comprehensive literature in Germany which he would call "sociology".
If on the other hand, "one goes further and enlarges the meaning into that
of Social Philosophy, one may quote, since Kant, a large number of prominent
works of the romantic and idealistic schools, often under other names than
Sociology ".21 Von Wiese continues: "Comte, who may be considered as
the founder of the Western European sociology has influenced Germany, partly
through Herbert

Spencer
by his Positivism and his notion of Organism". But, "on the whole one
can hardly talk of a Comte-Spencer school in Germany, whilst Positivism, outside
the circles of Marxism, only found disciples for a short time" .22
Von Wiese points out,
that "Twenty-five years ago the connection of sociology with the Natural
Sciences was commonly assumed. But to-day there is a strongly dominant tendency
which claims that sociology is a mental science, and that the naturalist
interpretation of society is imperfect, and thus there is an endeavoUR to get
beyond Positivism."23 The contemporary state of German sociology, so von
Wiese, may be traced to three influences: (1) The German Romantics and the
idealistic Philosophy; (2) Comte and Spencer; (3) the development apart from
Philosophy due to other sciences, such as History, Political Economy and Law.
Mentioning Dilthey's : "understanding science" and Scheler's
"phenomenological method", von Wiese adds that these two writers
believe that "social facts" and their real dynamics" can only be
"sought in a study of their deeper spiritual motives". But, von Wiese
cautions, this "broadening and deepening of the methods of social science,
justified as it may be, has nevertheless greatly increased the danger of
subjectivity. Max Weber indeed taught us- and quite rightly- that we had to be
content with the subjective and conscious motives of the people under
consideration. But others ( ... ) deem it their duty to get at the objective,
absolute, meaning of events". The editor of the "Kolner
Vierteljahrshefte fur Soziolgie" has little patience with Othmar Spann, who
von Wiese claims, "proposes a sort of Social Metaphysics", and who is
opposed to any kind of empiricism in sociology. The "Idea of the Whole, of
Society as an Entity, of which all social groups are only parts and members, is
predominant with him. Let us look at Othmar Spann's sociology, since it is of
primary importance for understanding Eric Voegelin's concept of the nature of
sociology.

4. The Sociology of
Othmar Spann
According to Othmar Spann society is the objectification of the inner life of
human beings, a reflection of their ethical and moral nature. Not just action
and intention, but also insight, thought and intuition are morally positive or
negative. Therefore, so Spann, in order to understand the outward forms of life
as it is expressed in institutions, one must proceed from a knowledge of the
moral being and move to the periphery, to the empirical facts of the external
world as embodiments, however remote, of the moral center. If empirical research
is to be more than a random collection of data it must be informed by moral
insight. The sociologist, in order to do his work properly, must be a
"personality", a term Othmar Spann takes from Immanuel Kant, denoting
a being endowed with reason and therefore morally free.24 If, so Spann, a person
does not know in his own being what, for instance, "justice" is, he or
she will certainly not understand the social institutions which were created for

22Ibid.23Ibid.,
p. 22
24 Othmar Spann, Gesellschaftsiehre, p. 5.

its administration. 25Sociological investigation is not interested in mechanical laws of cause and
effect, a model for investigating the inorganic world developed in early modern
physics, but rather explores "meaningful connections" ("sinnvolle
Zusammenhtinge ',).26Behind every sociological investigation, reflected
or unreflected, their looms, according to Spann, a metaphysical notion of the
human being. What is called modern sociology, which Spann traces back to Hobbes
and the French Encyclopaedists, fails to be social science at all because of the
false materialistic metaphysics which informs it. True social science, which
Spann finds in Plato and Aristotle as well as in St. Thomas, revives in the
modem period with German Idealism and the Romantics who oppose mechanical
conceptions of the human being with the deeper understanding that the human
lives in community with God and only through God in community with one another.
Sociology, so Spann, must follow "value and being" ("Wert und
Sein") to their root in the moral person. Such a science precludes a method
based by analogy on a model of the sciences of natural phenomena .27Spann
rejects von Wiese's notion, indebted to the theories of Georg Simmel, that
sociolology is the science of "social forms".28 Instead, he argues,
sociology investigates a concrete totality, society, whose nature is spiritual.
The relation of the parts to the whole and to one another is that of spiritual
spheres of greater and lesser dignity. These relationships do not have to be
deducted from an apriori notion of social reality, nor explicated in
metaphysics. By analysing the human being in society one can identify the
different spheres, the spiritual, the vital etc., and differentiate the realm of
ends from the realm of means. Plato and Aristotle have given examples, so Spann,
of such a science .29

The
whole is prior to its parts, and the investigation must begin with the spiritual
reality of society. But the decision to begin one's study with the whole does
not mean that one can overlook the "inalienable value of the individual's
moral freedom %30 an
error which, so Spann, Hegel committed. Spann's sociology tries to avoid the two
extremes of a collectivism which overlooks the individual and an individualism
which erroneously assumes that fully developed individuals enter into contract
with one another to create society out of the sum of their already defined
private interests. Rather, according to Othmar Spann, the human only reaches his
specifically human individuality, namely his moral autonomy, by being awakened
to it in the spiritual process Spann calls "Gezweiung". This term may
be translated as "community" or as pairing" and denotes a
spiritual connection between two or more human persons. In the Gezweiung
"family", for example, there are not two individual exemplars of the
species homo naturalis, who just happen to enter into the relationship of
parent and

child. Rather both parent
and child participate in the spiritual reality of the family as they grow into
that particular community. Under "Gezweiungen" Spann understands
pretty much what are generally called institutions, for there is no human
community without a spiritual bond. This spirit should not be thought of as
static or as a substance. The unfolding of Geist" takes place in its
members, the individuals endowed with freedom and moral responsibility who are
awakened to their spiritual talents and grow into them in the various forms of
Gezweiung. Among the forms which Spann denotes as "equally primordial"
("gleichurspruinglich"), are religion and philosophy, science and art.
Since the individual in his thinking and actions is a morally free agent he can
of course reach a deeper understanding of the nature of the particular sphere
into which he has entered than the other participants have attained. In this way
the objective spirit, in its individual spheres ("Teilganzen "),31 develops
and differentiates in time, and societies and parts of societies experience
change and transformation. Correlative to the spheres of the objective spirit is
the realm of morals. Without going into detail it must be said that for Othmar
Spann religion and philosophy constitute the most important sphere. The highest
form of Gezweiung, the unio mystica with God, is treated separately by Spann .32
The depth of vision which one finds in faith, or in the mystical Gezweiung with
God, complimented by the ability to shape and differentiate the vision in
thought, become the center of the individual informing his thought and action in all other spheres.33

4.1 Comparison: Leopold von Wiese and Othmar Spann

On what do Leopold von Wiese and Othmar Spann agree?
1. Both assert that sociology based on an analogy with natural science or on any
form of "naturalism" were current in Germany around 1900, but have
been dead for a
quarter of a century.
2. They agree that the influence of August Conte has been minor. Spann, and
those
close to him, view the Frenchman's influence as not only slight but, in so far
as it
existed at all, "pernicious".34
3. Whereas Spann looks to Plato and Aristotle as the founders of social science,
von
Wiese shares the view of the American sociologist Albion Small that, Plato is a
"
prime example of what sociology is not". According to Small the problem is
that Plato
does not apply the method of observing the "objective world", in
search of
phenomena which can be brought under the laws of "cause and effect " .
35
4. Spann and von Wiese point out that there is little agreement in Germany on
the
nature of the science of sociology. And of course it is on the nature of
sociology that
von Wiese and Spann disagree. Von Wiese rejects Othmar Spann's theory, with its

central
term "Gezweiung" as a "sort of social metyphysics". In his
turn Othmar Spann rejects von Wiese' sociology of "Relationships"
("Bezieungslehre") as a "formalistic" sociology following in
the school of Georg Simmel, and equally incapable of coming to grips with
society. Von Wiese also understands his sociology to be following in the
footsteps of Georg Simmel, but of course rejects the charge of empty formalism.
Let us turn to Eric Voegelin's dissertation, Wechselwirkung
und Gezweiung, for an example of a work done in the school of Othmar Spann
in which the attempt is made to determine the nature of the science of
sociology.

5. Eric Voegelin's
dissertation 1922

Eric Voegelin has given a short description of his dissertation
"Wechsewirkung und Gezweiung"36 (or "interaction" and "pairing") in his Autobiographical
Reflections. "it concerned", he says, "the ontological difference between constructing
social reality out of relations between autonomous individuals or of assuming a pre-existent
spiritual bond between human
beings that would be realized in their personal relations".37 The term "Wechselwirkung", or
"interaction", was taken from Georg Simmel's sociology and refers to the psychic actions and responses of
individuals. Othmar Spann's term, as we have seen, denotes the fact that noetic acts take
place in spiritual community.
The 150+ page dissertation, written at the University of Vienna in 1921 under
the direction of Othmar Spann and Hans Kelsen, is divided into two equal parts. In
the first Voegelin explicates the meaning of "Gezweiung", contrasting it
with the theory of Interaction". The second examines the thought of Georg Simmel, the
sociologists associated with "Die Kolner Vierteljahrshefte fur Sozialwissenschaft",
Theodor Lift and others. Voegelin asks: What is the object and method of sociology? What type of a
science is it? Simmel's theory of "interaction" is inadequate because, despite
its attempt to explicate spiritual being, it remains in the sphere of psychic being.
Nevertheless, so Voegelin, there are aspects of the theory which can be brought into harmony with
the social theory of Othmar Spann, especially with the themes associated with the
term 'Gezweiung'". 38 It is Voegelin's intention to build on these results in
order to develop a theory of sociology. The "task of sociology is to grasp a phenomenon in
its quality of being a "social phenomenon". For example, so Voegelin, sociology
must be able to determine why a particular painting is a Dutch painting, or a particular

philosophical system a French
philosophical system, etc.39 The sociological method assumes the knowledge
of essences- one must know what a painting "is" before one can ask the
question concerning its social being- but sociology itself is not concerned with
the essence of an entity, for example the question, what is art?40 Although
sociologists, according to Voegelin, disagree on almost everything, they do
agree that social phenomena appear only where humans are joined with one another
("Menschen in Verbindung ").41 Therefore the human's relationship to
the "creative spirit" which brings forth cultural objects is a
relationship to the "socialized spirit" vergeselIschafteter
Geist" ).42 The basic problem confronting the sociologist is found in the
fact that while, on the one hand, society exists independent of individuals,
existing prior to them and maintaining its identity after the individuals have
passed away, on the other hand, society is dependent upon individuals and can
only exist in and through them. The solution to this antimony, so Voegelin, is
to be found in the fact that the human individual is a composite being. As far
as the physical and psychic levels of the human being are concerned the
individual is a closed being. For neither is the physical individual part of a
larger whole, nor are the individual's psychic functions part of a larger
entity's psychic being. Upon this substratum of physical and psychic being
society rises. However, spiritually the human is not a closed being. What the
individual is spiritually he is only in community with others
("Gezweiung"). Therefore it is fair to say that society is a
super-individual relationship.43 But it is a relationship between spirits, not
between bodies and psyches. Before Voegelin proceeds to present arguments for
his view, he examines previous attempts to grasp social reality by those who,
according to him, pay insufficient attention to the ontological difference
between the human's psycho-physical nature and the human's spiritual being.
Among such failed attempts Voegelin points to the assertion that the unity of
society may be found in the interaction of its individuals, the "formal
theories" criticized by -Othmar Spann with reference to Georg Simmel and Leopold von Wiese. Here we can pass over von Wiese. For, after an
examination of one of von Wiese's principle theoretical explications, Voegelin
concludes that von Wiese's "thoughts follow completely in Simmel's tracks
... and fail to show, in any single point, the least progress beyond" him .44 According to Voegelin, the theory of interaction denotes the double chain of
causality in which the psychic acts of individuals mutually impact upon one
another. The theory assumes that society is the sum of individual interactions
and that societies differ from one another only by virtue of the intensity and
number of such interactions. Members of one society have more frequent and more
intense interactions with each other than they do with individuals of another.
Thus society is quantitatively determined. But the theory fails to explain how
quantitative interactions

Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 2. ed.
Munich 1917.

40Eric Voegelin, Wechselwirkung und Gezweiung, p. 2.

41
Ibid.

42 Ibid., p. 3.

43 Ibid., p. 10f.

44 Ibid., p. 110.

transform into the
qualities by which a society knows itself as a society, and by which it is distinguished from others.
Thus, so Voegelin, the theory fails to address the nature of social reality.
With the example of the process of social assimilation, Voegelin illustrates the theory's
inadequacy. A person leaving one society and entering a new one ceases to have interactions with individuals in the former society and enters into relations
with individuals in the new society. Nevertheless not all individuals with this
experience assimilate to the new society. And the reverse is also true, a person who has
left one society and assimilated to a new one can return to the former society and,
despite renewed interactions with the individuals of that society, find himself a
stranger. Voegelin readily concedes that physical and psychic interaction are necessary to
the process of assimilation, but, it is clear from these examples, so Voegelin, that
the causal-mechanical and psychic processes between individuals presented in the
theory of "Interaction" cannot explain social acts .45 He suggests instead that
interactions between individuals are bearers of a "substance"- using
that term merely as a marker for an as yet undefined quality- which constitutes the social
relationship Soziale Beziehung". To explore the nature of this "substance", Voegelin reformulates the
paradox mentioned earlier on the relationship of individuals to society, now in terms of
the social substance:
1) The social-substance relationship exists prior to and encompasses the
psycho-physical individuals.
2) The social-substance relationship is rooted ("fundiert") in
psycho-physical
interactions ("Wechselwirkungszusammenhang").
The two types of relationship occur in different parts of the bodily-spiritual
unity
leiblich-geistige Einheit"), which we call "human" .46
The psycho-physical ego is
the subject we speak of when we view the human being
under the aspect of his belonging to the realm explored by the natural sciences.
But
for the social sphere we require, according to Voegelin, a new term, that of the
"social-ego" to denote
the realm which rises above the sphere of physical and psychic
nature .47
Voegelin credits Othmar
Spann with having adequately explained the nature of the social-ego. It cannot be seen in the relationship of "part to whole",
with "society" being the "whole". Rather the totality "society" is a
quality of which the social-egos are qualitative elements. All spheres of the spirit- family, state, etc. evince
the same structure. The participants in these spheres are the corresponding types of ego.
The totality of these spheres is society. And in correlation to society we find the
social-ego, the synthesis of the various types of egos corresponding to the respective spiritual spheres which make up social reality.
As a spiritual being ("geistiges Wesen"), the human is a social-ego, a
spiritual quality open to and participating in an encompassing spiritual reality. The social-ego
is rooted in the psychic-physical being, but it is not identical with the psych
ic-physical

ego. Further,
the foundational parts- body and soul- only attain meaning and purpose to the extent that they help the spiritual part fulfill its purpose. Here
Voegelin quotes Immanuel Kant on the dignity of the human being. By means of his reason the
human can raise himself to freedom and independence; he is a
"personality" that is,
a being who is above the mechanical laws of nature and watches over it,
including those parts of himself which fall under the laws of nature. In the form of
imperatives, the free personality confronts this part of the self with the laws discovered by
reason. 48
In pointing out the dual
nature of the human being sociology has gone as far as it can go. It does not have the conceptual means to explain it in detail, that is a
task for metaphysics. But sociology must recognize the fact of this duality to avoid the
pitfalls of confusing the spiritual sphere with that of the psycho-physical levels of
being.
The spiritual totality exists prior to the individuals who grasp its meaning.
But in the various depths and completeness of their understanding individuals also define
themselves and differentiate themselves from one another and the whole .49
Against Hegel and Marx, Voegelin writes: "The social processes do not take place in
some transcendent mythical consciousness which reduces the individual to a
meaningless emanation of the encompassing social totality: "It is the individual, who
must think".50 The situation of social communication is thus placed in the realm
of man's moral being. The spiritual impulse ("geistige Anregung") is itself
experienced as a value and therefore sought by the individual in order to intensify and deepen
his understanding. At the same time the individual effort contributes to the
spiritual growth of society. Therefore: "it is an imperative, or postulate to
maximize and deepen the experiences made in community" ("Gezweiung"). "In
the last instance" all
acts of socialization (I'Vergeselischaftung") serve this ethical purpose.
From this point of view society and the individual may be viewed as "dynamic factors in the
realization" of ethical contents.51
Thus, Voegelin answers the question he raised at the beginning of his
dissertation. The object of sociology is not the individual member of society experienced by
our senses, but the spirit. Sociology is concerned with imperatives and processes in
which spiritual meanings are realized .52 As sociologists, so Voegelin, we move
in a world of postulates, imperatives and values. Objectifications of the spirit,
such as works of science or art, states and economic orders, are relevant to the
sociologists in their character of being points of passage ("Durchgangspankte") for
the realization of meaning in the processes described. Institutions are "signs for
complexes of meaning", they are "ways to ideas created by individuals in their
activity as members
of a social relationship" .53
The totality to which the
individual belongs is a spiritual process which, principally, can never come to an end, since each new act of the free personalities involved
in it48Ibid., p .
23.

49Ibid., p. 33.

50 Ibid., p. 34.

51 Ibid., p. 38.

52 Ibid., p. 39.

53 Ibid., p. 44.

lead to new experiences which
carry it forward. But the primacy of the whole before the individual remains.
For it is only in community that the individual's spirituality is awakened and
all spiritual acts, whether direct or mediated through other instances, have as
their intentional objects other spiritual beings who are equally involved in the
realization of values. To sum up Eric Voegelin's understanding of sociology, as
we find it in his dissertation, we may say that in his view, like Leopold von
Wiese and Othmar Spann, the issues of naturalism and positivism are dead. They
do not even receive mention in his discussion of the theory of sociology. With
Othmar Spann, and against von Wiese, Voegelin criticizes "formal
sociology" for its failure to address the spiritual sphere, which makes up
social reality.

5.1. Othmar Spann and Eric Voegelin: The Religious Roots of Community

One important aspect of Othmar Spann's sociology which is not discussed in Voegelin's dissertation, but which becomes the middle point in works that follow
it, is that of the highest "Gezweiung" the unio mystica with God. Spann
writes: "Just as a member of a totality points to the totality of which it is a part, so that
totality points in
its turn to a higher one The center of the highest totality points to God".54
This highest form of community orders the spiritual nature of the human being, just
as the spiritual nature as a whole [ends meaning to the physical and psychic realms of
human nature.55
Thus we find in Voegelin's first book, The Form
of the American Mind,
the distinction (borrowed from Scheler) of spheres peripheral to the person and those central.
At the heart of this study is the investigation into the American's understanding
of God.56 Likewise in Race and
State the statement:
"Schelling's doctrine of myth as the ground of being of all peoples or nations seems to us the first profound insight
into the religious nature, in the broadest sense, of all community formation".57
This key thought is reformulated in his last publication before his enforced exile, The
Political Religions: "The
political community is
always integrated in the overall context of human experience of world and God, irrespective of whether the political sphere
occupies a subordinate level in the divine order of the hierarchy of being or
whether it is deified itself"58.
The thought behind these three examples is that a social science which does not take God into account, fails to take the human into account, for the human being
was

54 O. Spann, Gesellschaftslehre, p. 179.

55Ibid.,
pp. 184-187.

56"A
formal Relationship with Puritan Mysticism", chapter three of: Eric
Voegelin, The Form
of the American Mind,
(German, 1928). Now in:
The Collected Works
of Eric Voegelin, vol.
1, Baton Rouge 1995, here pp. 126-143.

created imago DeI.
This important point was made in an unpublished work which Voegelin worked
on ca. 1931-1932, the "Herrschafslehre" ("Theory of Domination
")59 According to Voegelin, in the field of social science it is Othmar
Spann who has " most clearly and rigorously" explained the spiritual
nature of the human being and society. "All the contents of our spirit, and
our spirit as a totality, are linked to and contained in a higher spirit.60 What
a person "is", is found in the experience of God. Therefore, a
"philosophically competent attempt to answer the question of what a person
is, takes place in a basic form of philosophical thought called meditation m.61
Voegelin demonstrates this basic form of philosophizing with reference to Books
X and XI of St. Augustine's Confessions. The experiential character of
the meditation must be born in mind: Augustine is not seeking a concept of God,
but God. The meditation has a direction; Augustine is moved by "an uneasy
heart" to seek peace for his soul. By contemplating the various levels of
being- the physical, organic, animal- he discovers that God is not adequately
represented in any of them. By means of progressive elimination ("via
negativa") the meditating person reaches the deepest recesses of the self.
Here he discovers that "his" consciousness is contained in a higher
consciousness. In religious terms the individual overcomes the amor sui to open
himself to the amor Dei in a double sense: First, in opening himself to God's
love, he knows himself held in God's love. Second, in opening his own soul he
imitates God, actualizing the godly (caritas) in man. The soul's double opening
is the experience which constitutes the human being as imago Dei. The knowledge
that the human being finds the highest form of community in deo and enters into
community with his fellow humans through God, gives a new urgency to Eric
Voegelin's criticism of formalistic theories of sociology which neglect the
spirit and of naturalistic and positivistic theories which deny it. Let us
therefore turn to the criticism of social science from the standpoint of the
acts of cognition relevant to faith.

6. Max Scheler: Social
Science and Salvation

In a letter to Jakob Taubes in 1953 Eric Voegelin wrote that his studies
received an important impulse ("entscheidende Anregung") from Max
Scheler's criticism of

59Eric Voegelin, "Herrschaftslehre und Rechtslehre" (ca. 1931-1932).
Notes,
Typescript and holograph, Eric Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, box
53,
file 5.60Eric Voegelin, Herrschaftslehre,
Section 11, p. 61.
61 Ibid., Section 1, p. 1.
62 Eric Voegelin, Letter to Jakob Taubes, 28. February, 1953. In: Eric Voegelin
Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, box 37, file 10. Max Scheler, also a member
of
the German Society for Sociology, presented his Sociology of Knowledge at the
society's bi-annual meeting in 1924. In an acrimonious exchange with Max Adler
on
the one side and Scheler and Alfred Weber on the other, the society continued
its
perennial debate on the nature of sociology. Although on Scheler's side against
Adler, Alfred Weber in his turn also doubted that Max Scheler had presented a
sociological theory, referring to it as "philosophy with a sociological
label". See:

Comte's "Law of the
three phases" .62 In an essay on the "Law of the Three Phases"63
Scheler examines August Comte's claim that the human spirit has progressed from
a theological understanding of himself and the world through a philosophical
understanding to, at last, a knowledge of himself and the world in terms of
positive science. Scheler denies that any one of these modes of understanding
could substitute or replace one of the others. All three are equally primary
modes of cognition corresponding to three different spheres of
"objects". Scheler also distinguishes between three forms of
knowledge. The highest form is the knowledge of salvation (Erldsungswissen);
the second is that of culture, or philosophy (Bildungswissen); the third is
that of the domination or control of nature (Leistungs- or Herrschaftswissen).
The lowest form, "Herrschaftswissen", is directed toward the
control of phenomena in the realm of the space-time continuum. "Bildungswissen"
aims at the apriori knowledge of essences. The highest form of cognition,
which Scheler calls the "knowledge of salvation", seeks to participate
in the ultimate ground of being, the sphere of the absolute or godly being.64
That Comte could assume that positive science replaces the other modes and
spheres of knowledge, Scheler attributes to the decadent state of Western
culture during the last three hundred years which believed that the death of the
religious and metaphysical spirit which it observed in its milieu constituted a
"law of progress" applicable to human civilization in general.65

6.1. Humanitarianism

Thus in an address in 1917 Max Scheler asked his audience to see the World
War as a "symbol of the peculiar moral status" of contemporary
European man. If the center of our moral life is the commandment, "Thou shall
love God with all thy heart and with thy mind and thy neighbour as
thyself"', then the current situation- a 11 wholesale atrocity the like
of which the world" has not seen before- can only fill one "with
despair" .66 Scheler is of course aware, that there has always been a
tension between the spirit of Christianity and the earthly laws of social life.
But, according to Scheler, the task of " incorporating the spirit of Christ
into visible public life" was given up long ago. Scheler

focuses on the
"Christian idea of love", from which the idea of Christian community follows, in order to show how Europe has fallen from this ethos into a new one
of which the World War is the clearest expression. Among the most important
elements which have contributed to destroying the Christian ethos and creating the new
one, he names:
1 )Humanitarianism taking the place of the Christian commandment of love;
2) Individualism and socialism, inasmuch as both attack the Christian idea of
the
moral solidarity of autonomous persons;
3) The "sovereign" State and its "unbounded will";
4) Modern political and cultural nationalism which have developed in opposition
to the
Christian idea that each national culture, though irreplaceable, is complimented
by
the others;
5) "The idea of the 'autonomy' of culture. This has supplanted the ideas
and criteria
of Christian cultural community, according to which art, philosophy and science
should be integrated in the edifice of the ultimate, supreme and all-including
human
community: the invisible Body of Christ, the Church and its spirit" ,67
6) The replacement of the
organic community by societies based on arbitrary legal
contracts;
7) The bourgeois-capitalistic economic ethos of unrestricted production and accumulation of capital (whether by individual, State or consortium). This hasreplaced the Christian notion that various spheres of social activity, including
the economic, should be organized in solidarity of aim with the other spheres in
order to
supply all the needs of the community.
Scheler's historical sketch of how these variegated forces have shaped Europe is
made under the leading term of "Humanitarianism".Let us look at the
main points of this history.
"Humanitarianism" rebels against the first principle of the Christian
commandment of love: 'Love God first above all things'- with the immediate corollary,
'Therefore love your neighbour in God,
and always in reference to the highest good.' According to Scheler this revolt developed in the successive stages of the "classical
renascence, in the age of 'humanism', and with special force during the Enlightenment".
All of these movements worked to construct an ethos which isolates man from God and
indeed often plays man off against God. And even where Christian values seem to have been left in place, there is a change in the emotional and spiritual act
called love of one's neighbour.
The primary focus of this love is no longer on the individual's soul and its
salvation in solidarity with all other human beings, but on bodily well being alone. The term
humanity" no longer expresses a link across history to all those who have
gone before in a supernatural order including the dead. In this modern
"love" man is seen
as an external phenomenon. Increasingly man's sensual well being is viewed inisolation from the objective hierarchy of real and spiritual goods, which rises
by degrees to the highest good. With this orientation toward the world it comes as
no surprise, so Scheler, that soon the love of man is opposed to the love of God.
And, at
the same time, the inner unity of society begins to crumble.

67 Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, p. 366.

The seed of this
destruction, so Scheler, was sown unwittingly in the Reformation with its
emphasis on the individual soul and its faith which removed the entire group of
psychic acts which we call social from direct significance for human salvation. 68
The Enlightenment completed
the piecemeal demolition of early Protestantism's disregard of the task of "inbuilding
God's kingdom into this intractable world". 69 The Christian tradition
prevented the Enlightenment from unfolding its full destruction. But the final anarchy was
inevitable". 70What else remained? The idea of conflicting groups following
their interests or instincts, be they races, nations, states or classes-a
picture of fluctuating conflict of every kind. The clearest expression of this
"inner condition" of Europe is to be found in the "ideological
worlds of Darwin and Marx And even where the modern mind has not succumbed to
Comte's "Law of the Three Phases", it has, by living in the form of
knowledge of domination (Herrschaftswissen) suffered an atrophy of its aptitude
for the acts essential to the knowledge of salvation. Therefore, along with the
attempt to overcome positivism itself there is a need to overcome the prejudices
which grew in its wake in order that the human learn once again to see the three
types of cognition in proper perspective .72 An attempt to understand
human society without God, as it was developed by Hobbes, the Encyclopaedists,
and systematised by Comte, must take an object from the sphere of finite goods,
for example, by Comte, the abstraction "humanity", and place it in the
absolute sphere. This is an act of idolization. In order to develop the
categories we need to describe the full implications of Comte's idolization, I
would like to turn to Max Scheler's philosophy of religion. In addition to
Humanitarianism three additional issues will concern us here: 2) The intention
of Scheler's philosophy of religion, 3) The nature of the religious act, and 4)
the proper way of dealing with idols.

6.2.Philosophy of religionThe aim of Scheler's philosophy of religion is to renew natural theology.
"This task it can only perform once it has delivered the kernel of
Augustinism from the husklike accretions of history, and employed
phenomenological philosophy to provide it with a fresh and more deeply rooted
foundation. ( ... ) Only a theology of the essential experiences of divinity can
open our eyes to the lost truths of Augustine" .73 "The... method of
successively peeling away the correlates and contraries that are felt to offer
progressive indications to the 'phenomenon demonstrandum', with the
consequent laying bare of the phenomenon and its presence to the inspecting
mind, is the way which leads to the phenomenological scrutiny of the essence.
The indefinability of the X under investigation (per genus et differentia
specifica) is a sure sign that in this X we have a genuine elementary
essence which underlies ultimate concepts but is itself 'inconceivable'. For to
'conceive' means to reduce the object of

a concept in terms of other concepts".74
Scheler points out that the origin of this approach is to be
found in Plotinus in the same theological context which interests Scheler. 'Negative theology' arose from the deep conviction" that the divine and
holy form "a prime elementary quality which can only be demonstrated by a
slow process of elimination and analogy, a quality which must satisfy all
concepts of the divine- positive and negative- but itself remains
inconceivable" .75

6.3. The religious actThe religious act is not derivative of other noetic acts, or of any group of
acts found in other contexts. It has its own genuine essence, corresponding to
its object as the essential form of apprehending it. Furthermore the religious
act is constitutive of human consciousness. According to Scheler there are three
unmistakable characteristics of the act of religious cognition which, although
they must be expressed negatively, point to the act's positive contents. First,
the world-transcending character of its intention. Second, the fact that only an
object perceived as "divine" can fulfill the intention. Third, the
fact that it can only be fulfilled via the acceptance of a divine kind of entity
which is self-revealing ("natural revelation"). Thus, the principle of
religious cognition is: "all knowledge of God is knowledge from
God".76 Scheler expands on these points. In order to fulfill the religious
act's intention, the subject committing the religious act must gather all finite
and contingent things into a single whole, including the subject's own person,
and subsume them under the idea of the 'world'. This is not the empirical world,
or the world one knows, but all essential acts and their correlative objects
which yield the essence of "world". The idea of the divine as the only
correlate to the religious act which can fulfill it refers to the fact that in
all acts of thanking, prayer, praise, remorse, etc. which are directed to the
divine, the essential object addressed cannot be fulfilled by imagining any
finite content of the world- how ever "magnified" or increased in
potency- whether person, nation, nature, etc. as the entity addressed. The
religious act is directed to a being who is essentially beyond any finite good
of whatever magnitude. In this regard Augustine's heart which cannot rest until
it proceeds through all the levels of being belonging to the nature of the
world, is the "basic formula" for all religious acts .77 Thirdly, the
religious act differs from all other cognitive acts in that it demands
reciprocity on the part of the object intended. Only when the soul touches God
and knows itself touched by God can a religious act (even a natural one) be said
to exist .78
74 Ibid., p. 170.
75 Ibid., p. 171 76 Ibid., p. 250. 77 Ibid., p. 251.

78 Ibid.,
p. 254.

79 Ibid., pp. 250-264.

6.4. Shattering the idols

If, as Scheler argues," the religious act is not only a necessary one
but indeed the fundamental
act of human cognition, there is no question of it not being performed by the
individual. The only question which arises is whether it is adequately performed
and therefore finds the object to which the act essentially corresponds, or
whether it is inadequately performed and one "envisages an object,
acclaiming it as divine, as holy, as the absolute good, while it yet conflicts
with the nature of the religious act because it belongs to the sphere of finite
and contingent goods".80 Therefore, Scheler maintains, every person either
believes in God or in an idol. And he establishes the pedagogical rule that the
correct way of guiding one to faith is to show the person, or a typical class of
person, that he has placed a finite good in place of God, that within the
objective sphere of the absolute, which every person has, the person has
'deified' a particular good. In helping the person to discover this idol and to
shatter it, one helps the person to return to the natural faith in God. For,
though belief in God (orientation of the person's spiritual nucleus to the
infinite being and good in faith, hope, love, etc.) has no specific, positive
cause in the psychic history of man, such a cause certainly underlies disbelief
in God, or rather the permanent self-delusion of putting a finite good ... in the place of God, or of
treating it 'as if ' it were God".81 Once the idol is shattered and the mind
is freed from the "order of values that enslaved" the heart, the
religious act - so Scheler- turns from this idolization "in spontaneous
quest of its proper object, the idea of God". Thus, the correct method for
all religious initiation, the method which must precede any kind of instruction
concerning religion, is not 'proof', but the "awakening and activation of
the religious act, the guiding of it to its proper object and objective
good".82 Let us look at Eric Voegelin's relationship to these four
points.

7. Eric Voegelin and Max
Scheler compared

1) Humanitarianism.Concerning the nature of the last three hundred years of Western
civilization Voegelin agrees with Scheler that the falling away from God has led
to the current age of atrocity". In 1975 Voegelin wrote: "The
development of a nominalist and fideist conception of Christianity is the
cultural disaster, with its origins in the late Middle Ages, that provokes the
reaction of alienated existence in the dogmatic form of the ideologies, in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries".83 In 1951 Voegelin expressed this
thought in his criticism of Max Weber's sociology: He noted that Weber's
extensive studies of religion omitted pre-Reformation Christianity and he
suggested that the reason for the omission was to be found in the fact that
value-free science, itself a child of modern irrationalism, would collapse in
the face of reason still intact. The attack on metaphysics can be undertaken
with a good conscience only from the safe distance of imperfect knowledge. The
horizon of Weber's social science was

immense; all the more does
his caution in coming too close to its decisive center reveal its positivistic
limitations".84

Scheler argued further that the guilt which had accrued to
Western man for turning his face from God had grown to the point where
occidental man did not dare to "feel or think- much less expiate it".
This guilt, so Scheler, confronted him as an almost " objective
force", appearing to him as an external power or 'fate'". This
experience of hiding guilt from oneself found, according to Scheler, its
expression in the historico-deterministic social theories of the
time.85 Voegelin has made the insight that modern social thought is a mask
for derailed faith, whether in Comte, Marx, Nietzsche or Hegel, the pivotal
point of his analyses of of these thinkers: "in the modern state of
alienation, the enterprise of self-salvation dominates the concern with history
and meaning".86

2) Philosophy of religion
Following Scheler's intention to free Augustinism from the husklike accretions
of history and employ phenomenological philosophy to provide it with a fresh and
more deeply rooted foundation, Voegelin has explored "the essential
experiences of divinity" .87 He has pointed out that the social thought of
Plato and Aristotle find their center in experiences of transcendental godly
being. "When the philosopher explores the spiritual order of the soul, he
explores a realm of experiences which he can appropriately describe only in the
language of symbols expressing the movement of the soul toward transcendental
reality and the flooding of the soul by transcendence. At the border of
transcendence the language of philosophical anthropology must become the
language of religious symbolization". 88

3) The religious act
Therefore Voegelin's studies aiming, like Scheler's, to explore the maximum
opening of the soul for the cognitive acts which bring him closer to God, focus
on the pre-Reformation Christian experience of divinity which had further
differentiated the knowledge of salvation attained by the mystical philosophers
of Hellas to include an understanding of God's Grace: "The experience of
mutuality in the relation with God, of the amicitia
in the Thomistic sense, of the grace that imposes a supernatural form on
the nature of man, is the specific difference of Christian truth.( ... ) The critical authority
over the older truth of society that the soul had gained through its opening and
its orientation toward the unseen measure was now confirmed through the
revelation of the measure itself' .89

84Eric Voegelin, The
New Science of Politics. In: The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin, vol. 5, p. 103.85MaX Scheler, On
the Eternal in Man, pp. 59-60.86Eric Voegelin, Order
and History, vol. 4, Baton Rouge 1974, p. 255.87Compare Max Scheler, On the
Eternal in Man, p. 13.88 Eric Voegelin, Order
and History, vol. 3, Baton Rouge 1957, p. 363.89Eric Voegelin, The
New Science of Politics, pp. 150-151. Compare Order and
History, vol. 4, pp. 239-272 et passim.4) Shattering the
IdolsThe experiences of the Christian mystics mark the high point of the
understanding of man as a being whose essence is his orientation to the Beyond
of this world from which knowledge of the order of the world, the order of
the soul and the order of society flow. "In man's consciousness, the
foundational movement within reality from the physical depth becomes luminous
for the creative constitution of all reality from the height of the divine
ground".90 Proceeding from this orientation Voegelin analyses the thinkers
who have obscured the relationship between man and God and substituted inner
worldly idols for Christian faith. In substantial studies Eric Voegelin has
investigated the writings of Comte, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche in order to
demonstrate how the intention of the religious act toward world transcending
divine reality was derailed into immanent speculation.91

Representative for the
method employed in these studies is that of the essay comparing Nietzsche and
Pascal .92 In a letter to Karl Lowith Voegelin explained that he had undertaken
the comparison in order to confront the theologia negativa of such thinkers as
Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa and, "most importantly Augustine"
with Nietzsche's deliberate avoidance of the problem of Grace.93

In summing
up Eric Voegelin's work in relationship to Max Scheler's philosophy, we must
emphasize the connection between the religious acts, historical studies and the
criticism of modern social science. Not only had the centuries of
"Humanitarianism" obscured the knowledge of salvation, but the social
sciences which developed within

90Eric Voegelin, Order and
History, vol. 4, p. 334.

91 In the letter to Taubes,
quoted above, Voegelin directly relates these studies to the "decisive
impulse" his thought received from Max Scheler's criticism of the comtian
"Law of the Three Phases": "In contrast to Comte, Scheler draws
the conclusion that the truths which were discovered in the theological and
metaphysical phases must be carefully protected because the positive phase is so
obviously sterile in these areas. When today we find no creations
("Sch6pfungen") comparable to the Greek and Jewish-Christian
experiences, that is not an argument against their truth. Or as I would put it,
especially in relationship to Marx, Comte and Nietzsche, turning spiritual
impotence into a spiritual principle (geistige Impotenz zurn geistigen Prinzip)
- that is the 'modern' madness (der 'modern e' Wahnsinn)." Voegelin to
Taubes, 28. February 1953. Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, box 37,
file 10. For Voegelin's studies of Comte and Marx see: Eric Voegelin, Crisis and
Apocalypse, History of Political Ideas, vol. VI 11, The Collected Works
of Eric
Voegelin, vol. 26,
Columbia 1999, pp. 161-251/303-373. For Nietzsche see: Eric Voegelin, The Last Orientation,
The History of Political Ideas, vol. VII, [bid., vol. 25, Columbia
1999, pp. 251-305. For Hegel see: "On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery". In:
Eric Voegelin, Published Essays 1966-1985. Ibid., vol. 12, pp. 213-256;
also: Eric Voegelin, Order And History, vol. 5, 1985, pp. 54-70 et
passim.
92 Eric Voegelin,
"Nietzsche and Pascal". Written in 1943, this essay was first
published in: Eric Voegelin, The Last Orientation,
The History of Political Ideas, vol. VI I, pp. 251-305, The Collected
Works of Eric Voegelin,
vol. 25.
93 Eric Voegelin to Karl Lowith, 17. December 1944. Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, box 24,
file 4.

the ethos of
"Humanitarianism", led to "historico-deterministic" systems of
social thought which presented themselves as the "fate" of Western
civilization. In the form of "Occidental Rationalism", or the
"Proletarian Revolution" or the "Age of Positivism" -and
others- these systems became man's excuse for not facing the guilt that was his
for turning away form God. According to Scheler, it is characteristic of guilt
that the more it grows the more the guilty party hides its burden from himself.
And just as an individual can only break his guilt by looking on his past in a
new spirit, so nations and societies must do the same. Following the First World
War, Scheler investigated the act of repentance as a means, not only for
individuals, but also for societies to return to God. Scheler pointed out that
memory is not a mechanical process of " association" or of mere
psychological functions. When we turn to the past it is our spirit
("Geist") which casts light on what has been forgotten. When we
remember in a new spirit we recall things which otherwise would not have come to
light. For although events in the past are, in their physical aspects, over and
closed for all time, their meaning is incomplete. As long as humankind exists,
each event can be taken up in the new totality of meaning which later insight,
born of repentance and hope, can open.94

Eric Voegelin continues the work
inaugurated by Max Scheler's philosophy of religion. Therefore Eric Voegelin's
historical studies take as their starting point the pre-Reformation Christianity
which Scheler had pointed to as the period still spiritually intact. Of course
Voegelin's studies went much further into the past than the periods indicated by
Scheler. But the motive is the same: to uncover the lost knowledge of salvation.
This search is itself the most powerful criticism of modern social thought. For
both the return to past periods of spiritual order and the criticism of the
contemporary disorder depend on the "revolution of the spirit" .95
With the notion of the "conversio", the revolution of the spirit, I
would like to conclude this study with a final remark on Eric Voegelin's work in
its relation to the symbol Gesit".

8. Conclusion

I have tried to sketch a line of development in Eric Voegelin's thought from his
dissertation to his most mature work along the admittedly narrow thread of
sociology. Of course Eric Voegelin was open to, and learned from, other
disciplines and sources. But I have tried to show that his early training was
particularly conducive to and supportive of such an unfolding and deepening
which resulted in his magnum opus, Order and Histoty, and his late essays and
lectures. The reasons for this are four fold. 1. Following Othmar Spann, Eric
Voegelin's sociology focuses on the spirit, in the

94Max Scheler, "Repentance and Rebirth". in: Max Scheler, On the Etemal in Man, pp. 33-67.95Compare:
"Without the revolution of the spirit we cannot overcome our
distress". Eric Voegelin, "The German University and the order of
German Society: A Reconsideration of the Nazi Era" (German, 1966). Now
in: The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12, pp. 1-36, here: p. 4.

most pregnant sense of
that symbol. He defines society, and the individual's role in society, as the
deepening of spiritual meaning. (Later he would refer to this communal activity
under the term of "substantial communication", contrasting it and
opposing it to "pragmatic communication" and communication as an
"intoxicant".) 96

2. The basis and the
center of the meanings which are to be deepened are found in the transcendental
experiences of divinity- Othmar Spann's "Gezweiung" with God in the
unio mystica, Max Scheler's insights into the nature of the religious act
transcending all that is of "the world". This insight led to Scheler's
emphasis on the role of negative theology, as well as to the doctrine of
"shattering the idols", in order show the way, and to free the person
to return to the essential cognitive acts by which man prepares himself for
reception of the divine ("Erlosungswissen").

3. Eric Voegelin was
persuaded by Scheler's criticism of Comte's "Law of the three phases"
that it constitutes one of the idols of modern Western civilization; a science
of man without God. It is idolatry because it places a contingent, worldly, good
(so-called "mankind") in the sphere of the Absolute. As a consequence
it is also bad social science, for it obscures the realm of being in which the
experiences are made which lead to individual and social order. It denies the
insight of St. Augustine, that the heart is uneasy until it finds peace in God.

4. An adequate science of the human being can only be developed where faith
seeks understanding, and the rational ground of faith is found in the
experiences of divinity. Augustine, as Voegelin pointed out, is not searching
for a "concept of God", but for God. Such a search involves the
"conversio", the overcoming of the love of self, closed to God, to
attain the opening to God which allows one to find one's fellow human beings
"in deo". Without the conversion the intellect confines itself to too
narrow a spiritual horizon. Eric Voegelin's sociology becomes a philosophy of
individual and social order because it seeks to understand "Geist" in
the full amplitude of that symbol's meaning; that given to it in St. Paul's
"vision of the resurrected" . To underline the nature of the
"spirit" which is Eric Voegelin's scholarly and existential concern,
he has placed the following words of St. Augustine at the beginning of each of
the five volumes of Order and History: "In the study of
creature one should not exercise a vain and perishing curiosity, but ascend
toward what is immortal and
everlasting".98
96"Necessary Moral Basis for Communication in a Democracy". In:
The Collected Works of Ethic Voegelin, vol. 11, Columbia 2000, pp. 47-59.97 Eric
Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 4, pp. 239-272.98 St. Augustine, De Vera Religione, quoted in: Order and History, vols. 1-5,frontispiece.